I was invited by Francis Tseng of Golden Ages to create audio-reactive visuals for the band’s concerts.

The visuals revolve around a rotating spiral thing made of balls and lines, inspired by ctenophora and zooplankton. There are 7 “scenes”, one for each song in their set list. With each scene, the visuals becomes more distorted and more agitated. It was built with Processing and reacted to the sound of the band fed to the computer during the concert. The post-processing effects (blurring, glowing, displacement) were done with GLSL shaders. Above is a screen capture of this audio visualization fed with the MP3 of Everything Will Be Alright (official video).

This was a fun project and I really like how it turned out. Looking forward to work on more projects of this kind.

Solution for finding the normal of a point in a sine wave from this Gamedev forums thread. I had to solve this problem to calculate the normals of the moving tentacles, because each tentacle is a cylinder deformed by a vertex shader with a sine wave. I need to learn calculus. :-)

I feel that I haven’t explored 3D graphics in my projects so far, so that was one thing I wanted to do this time. But 3D graphics implies lighting, texturing, shadows, which are all difficult problems to solve. In the end, I only used one directional light and wasn’t able to implement shadows nor ambient occlusion.

Another important thing was sequencing. One person on Vimeo commented that untitled 246 lacked some sort of ending, and I agreed. Even abstract visual graphics can benefit from some sense of storytelling. I think this time there are too many things happening in the ending scene, but not much changes between the first and the second sections of song, so there’s an imbalance.

Conclusion: I think I tried to build something too big (or too complex) for my current OpenGL skills. Have to keep studying. Next time I’ll probably try something a bit simpler, though. :-)

PS: 2010 has been a busy year, I’ve worked on some interesting Flash development projects, but none of them are public yet. Hope to be able to show them soon!

Stogrepock is a remake of the classic Lunar Lander game. But in this installation, the two players control the spaceship using their voices, instead of a controller. This work is currently on exhibition at FILE 2009 in São Paulo.